Between the vestibule and the altar / let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, / and do not make your heritage a mockery, / a byword among the nations.
Why should it be said among the peoples, / ‘Where is their God?’” (Joel 2:17)
In 1875, the largest locust swarm in history was recorded over the Midwestern United States. Covering a region 20 percent larger than the state of California, the army of insects was estimated to contain several trillion locusts and probably weighed several million tons. Wild West magazine reported that locusts “scoured the fields of crops, the trees of leaves, every blade of grass, the wool off sheep, the harnesses off horses, the paint off wagons and the handles off pitchforks.”
The locusts, farmers grimly quipped, “ate everything but the mortgage.” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) describes the infestation: “The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.”
A century and a half later, locusts continue to threaten the globe. Recent outbreaks in Madagascar feature swarms ranging in size from 40 to 80 million insects per square kilometer. The effect on farmers, in one of the world’s most impoverished countries, is devastating, as the ravishing hosts can consume 100,000 tons of vegetation every day. Similar stories can be told across East and Sub-Saharan Africa.
It is just such an irruption of teams of locusts that is the context of Joel’s prophecy. Writing sometime in the fourth century B.C., the prophet spies an undulating black cloud on the horizon. It is an omen of destruction, and in his mind’s eye he sees the Edenic garden before him transformed into a desolate wilderness (2:3). The fast approach of the calamitous plague causes panic to rise within him and, as with most mortals about to be swept up in a tide of trouble and confusion, he looks heavenward: “To you, O Lord, I cry!” he exclaims (1:19), and he summons the people of Judah to prayer. “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain!,” he commands (2:1). “Blow the trumpet in Zion, appoint a solemn fast, proclaim a day of abstinence” (2:15).
Joel was entrusted with conveying the “word of the Lord” (1:1), but it is hard to know where the dividing line is between his divine commission and his human sense of desperation. For it is the case that nearly every human being, in a moment of fear or despair, appeals to God. People say “there are no atheists in foxholes,” and it is reasonable to suppose that the instinct to bargain with God in times of distress is a built-in feature of the human psyche. What is it that causes us to correlate our behavior with the complex and seemingly uncontrollable events that bring either prosperity or ruin?
It is that most of us suspect there is a moral nexus in the universe, an economic structure that governs both the natural and supernatural by some sort of metaphysical Newtonian principle. Some moral philosophers have likened this network to so-called chaos theory. Chaos theory attempts to explain complex systems, suggesting that the consequences of an action are not necessarily proportional to the action.
The weather is the most common example. There are so many variables affecting the weather that, even with the world’s most powerful computers, accurate long-range weather forecasts are quite difficult to make. The illustration often used is that, given the right conditions, a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing could cause a hurricane in New York. Perhaps the social order operates in a similar fashion. It is infinitely complex, and things like fashions and economic trends and political affairs are also impossible to predict.
Moreover, our experience teaches us that we are rarely able to anticipate the consequences of our actions. We have come to understand that even a small, secret little sin can have a sizeable, unforeseen result, and that we will not be the only one to suffer because of it.
A wry illustration of this can be found in a section from a monologue by the American humorist Garrison Keillor. Keillor is reading from the letter of a fictitious friend called “Jim.” Jim was a small-town college professor who taught classics. But when the department chairman announced that Greek and Latin were dead languages, and that he was to be made redundant according to the ancient principle of E pluribus unum (“the one from the many”), Jim was offered a job in college administration, in the counselling department.
And there this husband and father found himself befriended by a young, attractive female colleague. When the opportunity arose for Jim and his colleague to travel to a weekend conference in Chicago, Jim’s intentions became amorous, or, as he described it, “I had adultery in my heart.” We pick up the letter at the point where Jim relates what was going through his mind while he waited for his colleague to pick him up in front of his house:
As I sat on the lawn looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gasses come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard an intersection, and someone’s child may be injured. A sixth-grade teacher will think, “What the heck,” and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, “What the heck. I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.” Somehow my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, “To heck with the health department! This sausage was good yesterday. It certainly can’t be any worse today.”
Jim’s letter concludes: “we depend on each other more than we ever know.”
It is ridiculous, I know. And yet something about it rings true. The moral tissue connecting our families, friends, and social circles is thin and fragile. Our undisclosed sins do affect those around us. And even though the prophet Joel does not identify what these sins were for the people of Judah (and in this he distinguishes himself from the other prophets), he knows that if God’s people are ever to see his healing deliverance in the world, it will be from a perspective of humility and contrition. He assumes the need of repentance for all, and summons them to it: “Yet even now, says the Lord, turn back to me wholeheartedly with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn back to the Lord your God” (2:12f.). For this God, he affirms, is “gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, ready always to relent” (2:13).
“Ready always to relent.” In this we see the mystery of grace in action. For the prophet tells us that when we rend our hearts, God rends the heavens; that what looks like imminent destruction can become the means of our redemption.
This, in fact, is description of the cross. A manifestation of human hatred and cruelty, the cross was God’s instrument of salvation, the supreme display of divine love. And the only heart that may receive this love is the humble heart, the repenting heart.
Rowan Williams has said that “a Christian community doing its job is a community where people expect to be repenting quite a lot, and where the confident calling of others to repentance, which Christians enjoy so much, needs to be silenced by self-scrutiny and self-questioning before God.”[1]
Now I know that this can stray to the morbid. And in our perversion we have somehow managed to transform acts of penitence into meritorious deeds and occasions of pride. But this is not true piety. True piety has inner rewards that flow naturally from contrition. As every child knows, there is a great sense of relief associated with repentance and forgiveness. “A broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise,” the Psalmist writes (51:17).
I spoke at a clergy retreat in Edmonton a few years ago, and one of the retreatants described repentance “as almost an act of thanksgiving as much as confession”. Her description is a helpful corrective to those who sometimes describe Anglican piety (and especially prayer book piety) as an exercise in obsessive self-loathing.
The liturgy, with its “Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins” and “We do not presume to come to this thy Table,” is meant to bring solace, gladness, confidence, and strength. As Cranmer scholar Ashley Null describes it: “If the glory of divine love was to love the unworthy, the duty and joy of the justified is to return that love to God and to others.”[2]
And so on this Ash Wednesday, in the spirit of Joel, let us, in the name of the Lord, “observe a holy Lent”. And in so doing, may we discover the joy of repentance and liberation from the destructive infestation of sin threatening our Church, our world, and our very souls.
[1] Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), pp. 151f.
[2] Ashley Null, “Conversion to Communion: Thomas Cranmer on a Favourite Puritan Theme,” p. 248.
The Rt. Rev. Stephen Andrews, PhD served as Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto (2016-2025) and Bishop of Algoma in the Anglican Church of Canada (2009-2016). Previous appointments also include President of Thorneloe University College, Principal of James Settee College for Ministry, and Dean of Saskatchewan.
